S13 Street
Quite the production and process of building this damn car, so many design plans and counting. Getting it road worthy became a reality just a week ago so here we go…
We have came a long ways and are in the “final” stages of the build process. The vehicle is under it’s own power with a conservative wastegate spring/pump gas tune to get it on the streets sitting at 450whp.
A lot of adjustments are being made, suspension is far from setup to get the car trackable. No better way to work the bugs out then daily drive a car and put it through normal wear and tear. Surprisingly with all of the modifications and part replacements this car has been mechanically sound. I suppose it should be fine since everything is new but that is just me preparing for the worse. The amount of tools i’ve carried in this car since driving it would put some workshops to shame…
Initially getting the car onto the road the brakes were dragging…The braking system on this car is a Brembo Gran Turismo setup that has been custom coated to the D.O.C flourescent green scheme. To support the larger caliper duty, a brand new 300zx master/booster combo was added coming with a larger diameter master cylinder piston. That ended up being the issue, a small pedal adjustment was made and the brakes are beyond golden. This car stops like nothing I have every experienced in my life…
The cooling system is a very unique design with quite a few different goals in-mind. One of them being since this car is daily driven, temperature needs to stay reasonable for traffic and complete grid-lock. We have a motto at DOC Race, if your stopped stuck in traffic what the fuck are you driving for anyways?! You should be moving atleast 30mph of air and that has been more then enough to keep the DOC Supra cooled even in 90 degree weather. I would be speaking of absolutely NO cooling fans in this system (which sounds crazy to some), by taking the Supra to PARC (Pat’s acres) we had some temperature issue’s due to the short track/low airflow conditions. The S13 has a custom Dual-pass Ron Davis radiator which was specifically designed for this vehicle, giving it the best radiator ability within a mechanical water pump system.
The V-mount design also alleviates airflow being blocked by the intercooler, decreasing the cooling ability of your radiator. Front-mounts are so 1992, can’t forget about your cooling system!
Another key to this v-mount system is the airflow escaping through the hood vent drawing thru the intercooler. This specific hood has a large cowel drawing engine bay heat from the rear of the bay and out of the windsheild/firewall cavity as-well..
We don’t have a ton of HOT weather in the Pacific Northwest, recently we have been pushing around 90 degrees but tend to have higher humidity then the dry heat climates such as California or Arizona. This has been a great test on cooling abilities and I had an un-expected test last week sitting in 95 degree weather on the highway, full grid-lock with no cooling fans or anywhere to go. Car did fine through 35min of this traffic, no airflow or speed to help cool temps. Going into downtown Portland limping around the one-way streets in more traffic, we were stopping for lunch and as we pulled up to park I noticed the temperature just coming above the desired running temp. Not too bad if you ask me! Again, if your sitting around in traffic this probably isn’t the most entertaining time to be “enjoying” a drive so I don’t focus on rush hour times to drive anyways; it has done well though and I have been putting it through the paces to find any type of limit/issues with things.
Still have tons of plans and parts going on the car so as the bugs get worked out we will knock down the lists of improvements and upgrades. In the end, getting this car on track will be a large focus while still being more then streetable driving it to-and-from the track for whatever event is on the menu. It’s thoroughly enjoyable to drive even with 4″ oval side exit exhaust, Magnafuel Gear-drive external pump, Cusco 2-way differential and a plethora of other “inconveniences” to enjoy driving a vehicle on a day to day basis. About the most comfortable i’ve been cruising to work everyday in a lot of years.
I’ll have updates periodically as there’s lots of things in the works to continue reaching this projects goals. Baby steps I tell ya, baby steps….
